Recently, I’ve been puzzling over a particular item from the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick’s metaphysical mystery novel, VALIS. Number 11 in the Tractates Cryptica Scriptura states:

The great secret known to Apollonius of Tyana, Paul of Tarsus, Simon Magus, Asklepios, Paracelsus, Boehme and Bruno is that: we are moving backward in time. The universe in fact is contracting into a unitary entity which is completing itself. Decay and disorder are seen by us in reverse, as increasing. These healers learned to move forward in time, which is retrograde to us.

The best part of this, is that supposedly PKD filled up some 8,000 pages worth of stuff which is exactly as mystically cryptic as this. I don’t think the entire thing has been published yet, but I look forward to being completely daunted by it the day that it is.

Anyway, so last night I had a bit of a breakthrough in understanding what the devil he might have been trying to say in the above point. I’m just gonna ignore, for now, the list of people he mentions, and focus on the shit about time. So he says all this stuff about the motion of time, and moving retrograde or forward in relation to that. That was all very abstract to me until I had the bright idea to map it on top of the idea about the Big Bang & the Big Crunch.

I’m the farthest thing from an astrophysicist, but the way I understand this theory is that the Big Bang is the primordial explosion, which generated the universe. Ever since, the universe has been moving outward from this central point of expansion. In this direction, entropy & chaos increases, and energy runs down as it becomes more distant and distributed. This is the type of time that we as organical physical beings are accustomed to. Then there is a point at which (and I’m not totally clear on the specifics) the gravitational force of all this flung out energy and matter starts to suddenly contract. From this point on, chaos actually starts to decrease. Or rather, order increases, and the universe sort of would squeeze together and collapse on itself, until it reached a single point - a singularity. Some scientists theorize that during this period of contraction, time would actually reverse its flow. (There is also a Hindu cosmological concept which is quite similar to this, and could roughly be translated as a continuing series of Big Bangs/Big Crunches repeated ad infinitum.)

Going back to Philip K. Dick, he has this pretty big theme of entropy versus negentropy (negative entropy) as being the big struggle in the universe. The way we experience time is as increasing chaos. Like we are walking outwards from the center of the Big Bang, as it runs down and dissolves. And then there is also this Divine element which is responsible for the increase of order, or negentropy. So when he makes that comment about healers, saints, mages, etc moving in time, I take him to mean that they are moving like the Big Crunch, toward the center as the universe comes together into a single divine point of union.

I want to try to give this model a big more concrete physicality though, because it’s still sort of hard to grasp. So I came up with the metaphor of the Staten Island Ferry. It could be any moving vehicle I guess, but I just chose the Staten Island Ferry, because there’s something very melancholy about riding it. Anyway, so the way that I think we regular people experience time is like we are standing at the back of the ferry, facing the back of the boat, watching NYC recede into the distance. This is how we are in relation to our memories… the things get smaller, receding from view. The Big Bang, in other words. Suppose this is the only way you ever experienced time/motion in your life. You only ever saw things moving away from you, getting smaller. Things which you were about to experience, you wouldn’t be able to see them coming. You’d only see them move past you and shrink into the distance.

Maybe people who are “psychic” are just able to sort of “turn around” while they are on this moving ferry, and look around at the landmarks coming up. I think what PKD is talking about above though, is that “saints” or whatever is that not only can they turn around and see whats ahead, but they can also make the ferry start moving backwards towards Manhattan. Of course, it’s very hard to visualize being able to move backwards in time (relative to our usual motion) like that, and I don’t know if that’s exactly what he means.

The other aspect of this which I’m curious about is how during the Big Crunch, time is supposed to flow in reverse. The usual examples that are always given is that an egg which was cracked, cooked and eaten, would become uneaten, uncracked, and then made whole again. Similarly, old men would become young, and become unborn back into their mothers, etc. My question is, if this is a valid theory, how can we be sure this reverse flow of time isn’t happening simultaneously with our usual forward flow. If it was going backwards, would we really know it? I’m guessing not, since our minds and our physiologies are not designed to comprehend time in that way. So what I’m saying is that maybe the Big Crunch already happened, but we just don’t know it. This opens up lots of cool ideas about being able to penetrate into memories of the future, seeing evidence of the future in the past and 1,001 wild-ass things like that.

This also opens up alternate interpretations of what it means to reach enlightenment, moksha, nirvana, cosmic-consciousness, whatever. Maybe what it means is that you are released from the physically-bound Big Bang-style flow of time, and you can then move about freely. Anyway, its really just a whole mess of interesting questions and lots of good mindfuck material. Towards that end, here are a few links to other things to follow up your own pursuits in both directions on the arrow of time:

1. Some really amazing Jungian quotes on light, consciousness & time
2. Can time run backwards?
3. The Quran & the Big Crunch
4. Hindu Cosmology
5. Out of butter and water: the Hindu creation
6. Big Bang on Wikipedia
7. Kali Yuga, Rites of Passage and Modern Science